David Ciardi
Ariel Science Center

OK.
So thank you all for enabling me to participate by this remotely.
It's greatly appreciated and it gives me a chance to keep an eye on my family while I'm here and so the flexibility and acceptance of the EC and ExEP and the Community as a whole is is super greatly appreciated.
So I just wanted to say thank you.
I also want to apologize for to the Giovanna, since I was one of the people who.
Pushing to convince you? Wanna come give a talk. And then I didn't come to say hello.
So sorry, Giovanna.
All right.
So for those of you who don't know me, I'm David Ciardi.
I am located at I pack.
And this is this talk is about the development of the NASA Aerial Science Center in support of NASA and the US community participation in the aerial project.
And so it's just a very quick few slide overview of of what we're doing.
And where we're going.
So next slide please.
So you want to give a real nice overview of of Ariel as a whole, but I just wanted to mention that NASA has a partnership with with Issa on the aerial project through the initial case project, which was led by the ã Mark Swain. And this was Bas.
Contribution of the optical sensors for the for the spacecraft.
Both for fine guidance, but also for scientific.
Use in the optical to complement the infrared instrument that the mission already had.
And as well as we are providing.
Access.
To the data through the US Data Archive that will be located at IPAC. And so that was the that was the initial case project.
It was fairly limited in scope. Basically the instrument contribution and and the data archive to enhance and amplify the scientific return and US participation.
In the aerial project, NASA is establishing what is what we're calling the NASA Aerial Science Center, which will be located at IPAC. And this is very similar to what we have done for previous missions that enabled that were enabled by Issa and NASA partnerships, for example, Euclid is.
Currently flying and Ensi, which is the Euclid NASA Science Center at IPAC, was established in order to enable people to the US community to better participate in the Euchar mission.
And this and we did the same thing for Herschel.
We did the same same thing for Planck.
It's it's a long running.
Method for NASA to really amplify the participation for the US community in our partner missions with ESOP.
So there are four main areas that the Science Center is going to is establishing the first and foremost, which is what I'll talk about most about for the remaining few slides is that we have funding for the US community to participate and to contribute.
But then the Science Center as a whole is going to enable community engagement and support throughout the lifetime of the mission we are participating.
In the ground system to help to help.
The project.
Accomplish.
Few of the tasks in particular, as Giovanni mentioned in the previous slides, the complementary science program for the public to to.
To have targets observed with Ariel, we're we're part part of that part of that planning and and development of that program. And then just in general, we're developing a larger user analysis environment to be able to look at the aerial data in the context of all of the.
Other data.
Are available for these for these targets, particularly spectroscopy from J2ST, information from the NASA Exoplanet Archive.
That kind of idea, the next slide please.
For this talk, I mostly want to talk about the the Community funding program, because that's what's actually started and happening.
And the funding programs.
Are aimed to enable the community to engage with and contribute to the aerial science, and we have sort of three phases to this program that span the mission lifetime. The 1st is contributions to the preparatory science program which is starting. Now there'll be a participating scientist program as.
We get closer and closer to launch.
This will be something very.
Akin to what we did with Kepler, where they were programs to.
Participate in the science of aerial and contribute to the science of aerial as a whole, and then we'll have general community aerial data analysis support like we would for any other any other mission that NASA's involved in.
You can see the timeline here.
It's in the sense of launch is expected currently near the end of 2029.
And we expect to have two preparatory science calls.
One is already out.
We expect to have another preparatory science call in a couple years and then the initial participating scientist call is geared to be centered around the same time that the aerial mission will have the complementary science call that.
Giovanni had in her slides during her talk.
And then we'll have data analysis program throughout the mission like we would any other.
Any other spacecraft mission? Next slide please.
So as I indicated, the first preparatory science call has actually come out.
This is like all good programs. We had to come up with an acronym.
So this is the US contribution, the aerial preparatory science or US caps and the goal here is to contribute to and provide observing of targets that are of interest to the aerial mission and the consortium. We worked with the project specifically Giovann herself, but also.
Leads of the Aerial Science Consortium working group.
And and the Easter project scientists to identify the key areas where us astronomers can best contribute to the ongoing preparatory science needs of the project.
And there are three main areas.
The first is confirmation of test candidates that are appropriate for the for Ariel. Also, determination of masses and orbits of known planets that are likely to be aerial targets.
And then better and more detailed stellar stellar characterization of the host stars.
For systems that are likely to be aerial targets, and as Javad indicated in her talk, and actually lots of talks throughout the the day today and yesterday have indicated that stellar characterization is of critical importance in order to understand the planets themselves. The first call is is a.
Two year observing program and you can bring your own resources to the to the observing program. But NASA is also making available.
Observing nights.
On Keck and on win for these 4 semesters.
By the time we get.
By the time I'm giving this talk that you know the mandatory notices of intent were already due before the new Year and the the proposals are due.
In in less than a month, but I would like to put out that this is just the first call we expect. Like I said in the previous slide, we are expecting to have another call in a year, year and a half and the goal here is to start.
The observing.
The summer of this upcoming year, I'd also like to point out that working with the Aerial consortium and the aerial project, you know we've identified the set of candidates and or planets that Ariel is interested in. Those targets are available on the EXO FOB. This is a living.
List. The goal here is to not say that these are the aerial candidates that that will get observed, but rather this is the current set of list of targets that we are working to.
To characterize and.
I expect this list and these lists to change as we do more and more work.
But they are available.
Visible to the public through the Excel file. I'm happy to take more detailed questions about the program as a whole, but there's simply no, it's not enough time.
The point of this slide set was to just introduce the program to to the community.
Next slide please.
And finally, which isn't quite aerial. I do wanna mention that as.
The got mentioned many times this week that there's a conference in a month.
Know thystar know they plan it.
It's held on the Caltech campus. There have been many questions that we've received about whether or not we are going to still hold this hold this conference.
At present I just want to let everybody know we are still planning on holding this conference.
We're going to send out an e-mail to the community to let them know and I saw Jennifer that I'm out of time.
But I just wanna let everybody know that.
If you're planning on coming, you know, please plan on coming.
Registration is is still open until the 17th of January for regular in person registration.
Thank you everybody.
Apologize for running over time.